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Shop cleanliness is important for manufacturers dealing with high-precision machining of components for the medical industry. Just ask Brian Rosenkranz, vice president of Marox Corp., Holyoke, Mass. His company adheres to strict environmental policies for the production of implants, external fixations, and surgical instruments. The key to his clean shop? He recommends shops investigate portable pump/filtration technology.

Marox uses just one filtration unit, a PFA-1002 from Keller Products Inc., Lexington, Mass., to service nine CNC screw machines. Previously, the company had problems with chips and fines plugging coolant-pump inlet screens. The company had to shut down machines and manually shovel solids from the sump before fines in the coolant compromised part finishes or degraded the performance of the company's high-pressure coolant pump. Cleaning one sump could take up to three hours.

According to Michael Consolmagno, vice president of Marox's CNC Turning Unit, the company no longer takes machines off-line to clean sumps. And clean-up takes only an hour each week.

The PFA-1002 cleans suspended solids from a sump without the need to empty the sump or shovel out solids. The unit contains a high-capacity bag filter and a high-flowrate air-operated pump mounted on a compact cart. With the inlet and outlet hoses inserted in the sump, solids-laden oil is pulled into the bag filter, which removes and solids as fine as 5 µ.

Filtered oil is continuously returned to the sump under 20 gallon/min pump pressure. The force of the pressurized liquid discharge scours the bottom of the sump and keeps chips and sludge suspended in the sump for pickup by the inlet hose.

According to Keller Products, the unit can clean settled and suspended solids from a typical sump in 60 min or less. Users can move the cart-mounted system to another sump and set it up in minutes. The only maintenance needed is to empty or change the filter bag when the pumping rate slows or stops.